U.S. Sailors Enter Volvo Ocean Race

U.S. sailors Charlie Enright and Mark Towill, co-leaders of Team Alvimedica in the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race, have announced they are in for the 2017-18 event, in which they will be partnering with the environmental group 11th Hour Racing and past VOR sponsor Vestas.

Vestas, a global energy company devoted exclusively to wind energy, also sponsored a team in the last race, which had Australian sailor Chris Nicholson in charge. However, through a combination of bad luck and sloppy navigating, the team’s boat famously ended up on a reef in the Indian Ocean midway through the second leg and only barely made it back for the race’s final stages.

The 2017-18 VOR begins in Alicante, Spain, October 22. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn it will be making a stopover in Newport, Rhode Island, in May 2018, before heading across the Atlantic to Europe, where it will eventually finish in the Netherlands.

Vestas 11th Hour Racing, as the team is being called, represents the four campaign to officially throw its hat into the ring, though more are expected. As in the last running of the event, the 2017-18 race will feature Volvo Ocean 65 one-designs, which make it cheaper and easier to establish campaigns in the last few months before the race begins.

“It’s an exciting time,” Enright says. “We’ve achieved a strong collective of sponsors, and the boat has now been refitted and branded in Lisbon, waiting for us to get over there and get it out on the water. We’re working hard on building a competitive team ahead of the race, and have a couple of transatlantic sailings lined up for April and May.”

“Mark and Charlie have been serving as ambassadors for 11th Hour Racing for the past two years, having witnessed first-hand during the last Volvo Ocean Race the many ways pollution and plastic debris are destroying ocean life and threatening all of us,” says 11th Hour Racing Co-Founder Wendy Schmidt. “Our partnership with Vestas is about inspiring positive change in the way we think about energy and the natural resources of the planet.”

As a sign of the race’s strength and financial stability, the upcoming race represents the second time three major team sponsors have returned for a second consecutive try, with China’s Dongfeng and Spain’s MAPFRE also planning to be at the start come October. Dutch-flagged AkzoNobel is the fourth team currently in the mix. Vestas 11th Hour Racing will sail under both the Danish and American flags.

In all, this year’s race will cover 45,000 miles, with stops at Lisbon, Cape Town, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Auckland, Itajaí, Cardiff and Gothenburg in addition to Newport and the finish in The Hague.

Related

Plug & Play StereoIt can be a real pain to install a marine stereo inside a boat, what with the tiresome business of running cables through cramped spaces and finding somewhere sensible to locate the speakers. The audiophiles at Fusion thought about this and came up with the ...read more

Some years ago, the book Aak to Zumbra catalogued—and celebrated—the incredible diversity of watercraft that has evolved over the centuries, a diversity that remains evident to this day in the 11 winners comprising the “Class of 2019” in SAIL’s Best Boats contest. Indeed, it ...read more

Plug & Play StereoIt can be a real pain to install a marine stereo inside a boat, what with the tiresome business of running cables through cramped spaces and finding somewhere sensible to locate the speakers. The audiophiles at Fusion thought about this and came up with the ...read more

Presented by Vetus-Maxwell.Got a tip? Send it to sailmail@sailmagazine.comGuaranteed result What you see on the end of this halyard isn’t a beautiful Flemish Eye worked by a rigger, but it will make a big difference when you have to “mouse” a line through the mast. If the ...read more

A positive event and a lot of goodwill from the whole community based on the fact that ALL of the people involved went through a lot just getting back on their feet after Hurricane Irma and Maria. The US VI charter yacht show has 65 boats on its roster this year with 55 currently ...read more

The time has come when the prospect of cold drinks and long-term food storage has you thinking about upgrading your icebox to DC-powered refrigeration. Duncan Kent has been there and done that, and has some adviceFresh food must be kept at a refrigerated temperature of 40 degrees ...read more

There’s a time to go cruising and a time to stop. As Chris DiCroce found, you don’t always get to choose those timesAlbert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, ...read more

When a former winner of the Whitbread Round the World Race invites you to sail the Northwest Passage, there is only one sensible answer. No.More adventurous types might disagree, but they weren’t the ones facing frostbite of the lungs or the possibility of having the yacht’s hull ...read more